Competitive eater Jamie McDonald bears down on Succotash’s Sumo

Jamie “the Bear” McDonald did not come to Succotash for a leisurely Sunday brunch. Wearing a black baseball cap that complemented his dark, close-cropped beard, the world-record-holding competitive eater and KC native sat unsmiling at a corner table. All business, he ordered a Sumo. The bleary-eyed server suddenly snapped awake.

“The sumo is, like, this big,” she said. She spread her hands 2 feet apart. “It’s, like, a food challenge.”

Weighing in at 10 pounds, the Sumo contains scrambled eggs, potatoes, ham, peppers, onions, and cheese, wrapped in a giant pancake and topped with sausage gravy. It’s the equivalent of eating a small bowling ball for breakfast, and it’s mostly carbs. When it expands in your stomach, it hurts.

McDonald nodded. “I’ll take two,” he said.

As much as I wanted to see the improbably fit 37-year-old former bodybuilder defy physics and stretch the limits of human anatomy, I felt sick thinking about what lay in store for him. When I tried the challenge this past May, I barely finished one-third of the behemoth before I started feeling television static in my veins. Two sounded like a suicide attempt.

But McDonald, who owns a KC-style barbecue restaurant in Connecticut, knows what it is to suffer for his sport. He once consumed an entire block of Velveeta cheese in one sitting, just to see if he could. He cracked a rib stuffing himself with the deep-fried affront known to Mississippians as the “slugburger.” He has swallowed enough tater tots in a short time to make his mouth bleed.

The goal, he says, is to eat fast enough to override your body’s signal to stop, kind of like ignoring a car alarm that’s going off in your brain. The ability to willfully disregard a physiological emergency is a useful skill when you’re planning to eat a 5-pound tub of Marshmallow Fluff as fast as you can.

“At the end, all I could taste was chemicals,” McDonald said of the Fluff, which he scooped out of the tub with his hands and chased with a 3-pound bottle of chocolate syrup. “The next day, you feel like you’ve been poisoned.”

That’s the best-case scenario. But there are variables. Case in point: the sign on Succotash’s door that met McDonald at 8 a.m. that Sunday, announcing that the restaurant would open one hour late. This was problematic. McDonald had signed up to compete in a kosher-hot-dog-eating contest that afternoon. Timing was everything. But he decided to wait it out.

For one thing, he had an audience to entertain. In addition to my boyfriend and me, McDonald’s mother and his Web-developer brother, Joey, who films McDonald’s exploits for YouTube, were here. To kill that hour, the five of us headed to the nearby Filling Station, where McDonald sipped black coffee and talked about why he got into competitive eating in the first place. In a fine display of sibling assholery, Joey once double-dog-dared him to enter a contest in 2012. That’s when McDonald discovered his uncanny ability to eat a 12-egg omelet twice as fast as the average man.

McDonald’s mom, who still lives in KC, seemed less than jazzed about the whole affair, but she said she likes to see her son every chance she gets — even if that means watching him shove Taco Bell Quesaritos down his throat until he throws up.

“I do worry about him,” she said, “especially when he’s eating a lot of sugar.”

By the time we headed back to Succotash and placed our orders, it was midmorning. McDonald’s bravado had started to fade.

“I’m not sure I want to do this,” he said, covering his face with his hands.

Then the first Sumo arrived — looking at least 25 percent larger than the one I’d ordered three months before. It was covered with probably 16 ounces of gravy. McDonald picked up his knife and fork and began slicing the Sumo into bite-sized pieces and shoveling them in. A few minutes later, the second Sumo arrived. It was larger still.

“That’s ridiculous,” McDonald said, comparing the Sumo on the table with the picture he’d saved on his phone.

He had a point. The Sumo in front of him looked nothing like the picture. Apparently, this happens to McDonald a lot. He goes somewhere to do a food challenge, and what has been advertised as an impossible-to-eat dish arrives somehow augmented.

“How are you feeling so far?” I asked.

“Not that bad,” he said. “Yet.”

Almost like magic, the mountain of food on McDonald’s plate disappeared. My boyfriend was keeping time, and he said McDonald swallowed the last bite of gravy at about 12 minutes in. McDonald made no move to even touch the second Sumo. He didn’t need to. He had proved his point.

We parted ways on the sidewalk out front, with McDonald presumably heading home to have a nap and several small heart attacks before the Chiefs’ preseason game kicked off at noon. I wished him luck at his hot-dog contest and decided that I needed a nap as well. Watching someone eat like that is hard work.